Israel’s African Asylum Seekers Go on Strike

Strange signs greeted the customers of cafés and restaurants in Tel Aviv this week. “Today we will use plastic utensils,” one of them read. Another, on a shuttered bar in Jaffa, announced that the place would open later than usual and would serve a “limited menu.” The reason? Thousands of African migrants, who have found shelter in the city’s southern neighborhoods, working off-the-book jobs as dishwashers, cleaners, or cooks, had gone on strike. For the second day in a row, they took to the streets, marched down Tel Aviv’s beach promenade, and demonstrated in front of foreign embassies. On Sunday, the first day of a three-day strike, more than twenty thousand people flooded Rabin Square, holding banners that said, “We are refugees, not criminals.” By Wednesday, they were demonstrating in front of the Knesset.

The migrants and their supporters are protesting a new amendment to Israel’s Prevention of Infiltration Law. Previously, the legislation allowed the government to hold the undocumented—often refugees escaping from countries beset by famine, oppression, and mass murder—for up to three years without a trial, in a detention center in southern Israel. (In September, the Israeli Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.) Under the new amendment, which passed parliament last month, asylum seekers who enter the country illegally can be detained for up to a year. The compensation for those who agree to leave the country has also increased, from fifteen hundred dollars to thirty-five hundred dollars (where they are expected to go remains unclear). But the law also allows Israel to hold asylum seekers who are already in the country in an “open facility” indefinitely.

This new facility, known as Holot, has a capacity of about three thousand people. It’s termed “open” because detainees can, in theory, walk out of its doors. But the facility’s remote location—in the heart of the Negev desert—and requirements that detainees report to roll call three times a day and not seek work make it, in effect, a jail.

“The new law basically gives us two choices: be a prisoner indefinitely or self-deport,” Kidane Isaac, a twenty-eight-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea, and one of the strike’s organizers, told me. “We have been here for years without any sort of human treatment. We are forgotten, neglected.” The organizers’ goal, Isaac said, is “to tell the government of Israel to change its policy, and stop the arrests in the streets of south Tel Aviv.”

On Sunday, the United Nations refugee agency, U.N.H.C.R., issued a harshly worded statement saying that Israel’s “current policy and practices create fear and chaos amongst asylum-seekers.” These practices, the agency added, are “not in line” with the U.N.’s 1951 Refugee Convention, of which Israel is a co-signer. According to the Convention, signatories are forbidden from imposing penalties or restricting the movement of refugees—including those who arrived unlawfully. But the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears undeterred. On Monday, Netanyahu took to Facebook, writing, “No amount of protests or strikes will help.” He added, “We are determined to get the illegal infiltrators out of Israel.” Over the past year, two thousand six hundred “infiltrators” were deported, Netanyahu wrote; this year, “the goal is to make that number even higher.”

For people who have lived for years on the margins of Israeli society, this week’s protests and strike mark an unusually public move. Since 2006, fifty-three thousand asylum seekers have arrived in Israel, according to official figures; the vast majority of them—from Eritrea and Sudan, including from Darfur—trekked by foot for days across the Sinai desert. In 2012, some ten thousand African refugees crossed the once-permeable border from Egypt, before Israel erected a four-hundred-million-dollar fence, replete with cameras and sensors. The fence did the job: in 2013, only thirty-six refugees managed to find their way into the country. (That other refugees are now largely left to the mercy of the Egyptian border police, who have a history of gunning down asylum seekers, went largely unremarked.)

Fifty thousand out of a country of eight million seems like a negligible number. But the problem, the government argues, is that the migrants, many of whom have been given a “conditional release” that does not include the right to work while their cases are pending, have taken over large swaths of working-class neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and seized jobs that could have otherwise gone to Israelis. That these jobs often pay less than the minimum wage, and that they used to be held primarily by Palestinians, is, apparently, beside the point. (Following the Palestinian Intifadas, beginning in the late nineteen-eighties, Israel made it almost impossible for the Palestinians to commute from the territories, creating a vacuum that migrants—including legal guest workers from Romania, the Philippines, and Thailand—then helped fill.) In 2012, after a series of clashes between migrants and local residents in south Tel Aviv, the Knesset member Miri Regev, of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, referred to Sudanese asylum seekers as “a cancer in our body,” saying, “We will do everything it takes to send them back.”

On Monday, Gideon Sa’ar, the interior minister, referred to the migrants’ strike as nothing more than a fight between the Israeli food industry and the government. “The outcry of restaurateurs with dishes in their sinks won’t determine Israel’s policy,” he told Ynet. Sa’ar further disputed claims that Israel was violating the Refugee Convention, saying, “Any person who is entitled to a refugee status will be awarded a refugee status.” What he neglected to say was that, since its founding in 1948, Israel has awarded refugee status to fewer than two hundred people, according to statistics from the African Refugee Development Center. And some in the mainstream media seem to share the government’s hard-line views, with Yedioth Ahronot running an incendiary front-page headline on Monday that read, “THE INFILTRATORS CONQUERED THE SQUARE.”

This rhetoric does not, however, reflect the views of a large segment of the Israeli population that has come out in support of the migrants in recent days and months. Activists acknowledge the problem of illegal immigration, which isn’t unique to Israel, but claim that this doesn’t excuse treating the asylum seekers who are already living in the country in a cruel and inhumane manner.

“The refugee problem has been used by the government as a red cape that they like to throw around,” Sigal Avivi, a fifty-three-year-old activist from Tel Aviv, told me. “Instead of investing and improving the dismal situation in the southern neighborhoods, the government treats the refugees as scapegoats and says, ‘We’ll get rid of them first.’ ” Avivi added, “The sad reality is that the State of Israel needs them. Even though some of them were academics and many are educated, they represent a cheap labor force. So instead of bringing in other migrant workers on visas, we are telling the government, ‘Let these people work.’ ”

Some have pointed out that there is a sad irony in a country built on the traumatic experiences of refugees who are now seemingly willing to ignore the plight of others.

Isaac, whose family is still in Eritrea, reached Israel three years ago, after a winding journey through Sudan and Egypt that lasted more than a month. “I wanted to go to a place where I can have a temporary future and I thought that this country would take me in in a different way—a human way,” he told me. “Any human being can understand this.”